150 RFID Cards...

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I seem to have bought 150 RFID cards. As you do. I’ve been playing with RFID tag stuff for over ten years. The cards I’ve bought aren’t particularly special, but I think they have some internal storage too, which makes them even more interesting. And I do have plans for them. I don’t just spend 25 quid on a whim you know….

First plan is to give one to everyone who comes to the Hull Computer Science 50th Anniversary Celebration in October. I’m going to scatter a few readers around the place and use them to manage the free drinks. We also might have a go at some kind of RFID based Ultimate Werewolf thing.

Second plan is to fit a bunch to the bottom of the HullPixelbot robot arena so that I can fit readers to the robots and they can navigate by reading cards at different positions.

Hmmm. Having thought about it, perhaps I should buy some more…

Hull CS50 looking good

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Warren asked me for some words about the upcoming Hull Computer Science 50th Anniversary.

The celebration runs over Friday 11th October and Saturday 12th and takes place on the Hull University campus. We start with a welcome event on Friday evening, but the main celebration event is on Saturday 12th. We'll have robot rugby for the kids, research talks, campus tours, Hull Stories, Retro video games, embed you in carbonite with our 3D printers, slot car racing, and a 'Computer Science Welcome Party Redux' in the evening where you can relive your first departmental social engagement at Hull, complete with a dodgy quiz.

If you fancy a doing a bit of coding while you’re here, we'll also be running a Three Thing Game hackathon. Get your three 'game things' at our online event on the evening of Wednesday 9th of October and then spend as much time as you like building something impressive in our lab. We’ll be judging the games on Saturday afternoon and then presenting the winners that during the welcome party.

Ticket holders will get lunch and dinner on the Saturday, and those awfully nice folks at Visr (visr-vr.com) have put some money behind the bar for the evening celebrations. Why not come for the weekend and spend Sunday exploring the city or revisiting old haunts.

The event will formally start on Friday 11th of October at 6:00pm with a meetup on campus. A good place to meet up and unwind after your journey up to Hull. We'll be around to chat about the old times.

On Saturday morning our day of celebration starts at 11:00am with tours around the campus, or a coffee in the Bronte Brasserie. We'll have a memory board for pictures from the past (send us some if you want to be famous-ish) plus retro consoles to play on. After lunch we'll have a sequence of micro-talks, starting with an overview of current research activities and then moving onto stories from Hull past and present. If you've got something to tell we'd love to hear from you.

At 4:30 we'll award the prizes for the Three Thing Game competition and serve out the food. Then, at 7:00pm we start the evening's entertainments with a 'Welcome Party Redux'. If you've got fond memories of your first social gathering here this is your chance to relive them.

We're going to have a Welcome Quiz with fiendish questions, retro games, slot car racing we'll even 3D scan you and create an image of you in carbonite.

(this programme is slightly provisional and may be subject to change - especially if we can't find any carbonite)

You can find out more (and maybe even register) here.

HULL CS50 Postponed until later in the year

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It’s a good thing we didn’t put the date of the event on the logo..

We’ve been forced to postpone our anniversary event. It has not proved possible to get everything in place for the date in May. Some things take longer than you expect, even if you plan for this.

The good news is that the event will be going ahead later in the year, with a date to be announced very soon. If you want to get the earliest notifications, and take part in the conversation, head over to the Discord channel for the event.

Racing Cubes with a PlayStation 2

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All I need now is 15,000 credits…

Today we got our PlayStation 2 down from the loft to see if it still works. We’ve not had much luck with the PlayStation 1 - that had succumbed to a malaise that seems to have broken the CD player - but the PS2 works fine. We popped in a copy of Gran Turismo 3 and discovered that not only does the game work fine (and is still great fun to play) but you can also buy a Nissan Cube to “race”. As Cube driver (although not the model above unfortunately) this was all rather exciting. We were using a really fancy device that takes low resolution video signals and turns them into clean looking HDMI video. We are getting our retro games consoles together for the Hull CS50 celebrations and we should now have Gran Turismo 3 - with force feedback steering wheel…

Scalectrics at the Hull CS50

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Just needs a new rear axle…..

Had another planning meeting today for the Hull University Computer Science 50th Anniversary Celebrations. It was the best kind of meeting. We set up a tiny track and tested some of the Scalectrics cars we used to use for our welcome parties. The good news is that 5 of the 6 cars work OK (although they’ll need a bit of tidying up). So we’re going to set up the big track and having it running during the event. If you’ve been to Hull as student or staff in the last fifty years we’d love to see you. Find out more here.